FIERCELY LANGUAGE RESISTS: MICHELLE GIL-MONTERO IN CONVERSATION
Michelle Gil-Montero (photo: Dawn Zacharias) Earlier this year I found my way to Michelle Gil-Montero 's brilliant translation of Edinburgh Notebook / Cuaderno de Edimburgo by Mexican poet Valerie Mejer Caso . The notebook is a body, a landscape of grief and dying, of vanished paths. In the landscape (in the body) are mountains, shadowy ponds, quicksand, clouds compressing time, hallucinatory apparitions and transformations. SUSAN GILLIS: How did you decide to take on this project? Did the book find you or did you find it? MICHELLE GIL-MONTERO: I had recently translated Mejer Caso’s This Blue Novel , another book that confronts death and loss, and I really wanted to continue with her work. As soon as I began to read Edinburgh Notebook, I recognized a relationship between the two books that compelled me to translate Edinburgh Notebook next. At first glance, the books are pretty different—formally, and in scope. This Blue Novel is a sweeping long poem that maps gener